


His Red Right Hand

by M_Leigh



Category: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - All Media Types, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carré
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials, Gen, M/M, Misery, Oxford, Vignettes, background Ricki Tarr/Peter Guillam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-27
Updated: 2015-04-27
Packaged: 2018-03-26 01:41:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3832375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/M_Leigh/pseuds/M_Leigh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Oh, she’s settled,” Bill had said lightly, with the supreme confidence and self-assurance of a boy just gone nineteen. “Some foxes do this, you see. Change color in the winter, to the spring. She’ll be orange soon enough.” He ran her hand over her smooth fur, which stood up behind his fingers, staticky, and Jim Prideaux, curled up in an armchair next to him, curled up his fists in his lap.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	His Red Right Hand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [connaissais](https://archiveofourown.org/users/connaissais/gifts).



> As with so many things, this was written almost entirely with the aim of entertaining [connassais](http://connaissais.tumblr.com), after a mad conversation we had about it that was the product of me reading this book in two days.
> 
> Pursuant to that, this is essentially book canon, but I've also seen the movie many times and it is a favorite, so that inflection is here, too. I think that you could quite easily read this having only seen the film and find it satisfying. I also think this reads smoothly but it's essentially a series of connected vignettes, since I was quite taken with the idea but didn't want to write an epic. I wrote, essentially, what I felt like.
> 
> "His red right hand" is a quote from Paradise Lost (Book 2, Line 174).
> 
> Finally, I haven't put any warnings up, because nothing in here goes beyond the text of the novel. It is all quite bleak. Enjoy.

To sit in darkness here  
Hatching vain empires.

—John Milton, Paradise Lost

 

+

 

**1.**

“He loves us,” she said to him one evening, the last light fading out behind the fog, watching as he wound chickenwire around his little vegetable plot. “The boy.”

“Roach,” he grunted, sliding a stake through the wire. She put her head down on her paws.

“I know his name,” she said. “Not hers, though.”

“She never talks,” he said. “Or him to her.”

“He must somewhere,” she reasoned. “Someplace. That’s the trouble with these schools. No privacy.”

“If you board,” he agreed, shoving in another stake.

She stretched, turning around to scratch her teeth over her shoulder. Her fur, which had once been glossy and smooth, back in the olden golden days of the war, was patchy and lackluster now, but her eyes were still sharp.

“The other boys pick on him because she hasn’t settled yet,” she continued. “Whatever her name is.”

“I know,” he said, sitting back from the wire. “He’s a very sad little boy.”

She let out a low kind of hum of agreement (almost like a cat, which she very much was not), which then turned into a whine when his bad shoulder stiffened up. He reached up to massage it, face twisted.

“Jim,” she whined, head down, and he moved to lie down next to her on the ground, wincing slightly, in the summer twilight, though this was England, and not any of the other, warmer places they had spent summers: not Spain, once when he was a boy, or out east in the desert when he had been in the service. Before the service had hung him out to dry. Before his shoulder had been in pieces. She settled closer in next to him, resting her head on his chest and looking at him with her brown eyes like glass marbles. He stretched out his bad arm as best he could and settled his good one down on her head.

“I miss Bill,” she said bluntly, and he winced. She had started with Bill because it would wound him. “And Aurora.”

“Stop it,” he said, but although Jim Prideaux was in love with England he had been batted around from European country to European country as a boy, and in many ways had no country at all; and if it was true that this had beaten out of him any tendency toward intimacy (of the emotional sort) it was also in some ways true that inside of him there was someone who was perhaps not very English at all, for whom rectitude did not come naturally but had been painfully learned over the course of the many years of his life.

“No,” said Thisby, who happily or unhappily, depending on your frame of mind, had not been so beaten into submission by life, or the empire. Her head shifted under his hand. “I know you do, too. Jim.”

“Stop,” he said wearily, without force. The sky was purplish above him, through the fog, amidst the cloud cover. It was going to rain tonight. He could feel it in his shoulder.

“Will they ever come?” she asked in a small voice.

“No,” he said. Bill and Aurora would never come. “It’s not allowed. We’re cut off. We don’t exist anymore.”

“Bill doesn’t care about that,” Thisby said. He just scratched behind her ears.

“If I were a bird,” she murmured, eyes drifting shut, “I would fly all the way there myself. To yell at him.”

“You couldn’t make it that far,” he said.

“I could make it that far to get to Bill,” she said, and that was the last they spoke of it for a long time.

 

**2.**

The problem with spies, Roy Bland had once told Smiley, was that their dæmons could get so damn far away from them: it was the inevitable result of this that the twisting, rather dreary corridors and lifts and stairwells of the Circus were frequently populated by the unsettling sight of dæmons without their human counterparts, doing god only knew what. “As though you didn’t have enough trouble trusting the people in that place,” Roy, whose rather remarkable otter—he had grown up, he often wearily explained, going on holiday in Wales—was in the habit of traipsing off to the loo by herself to bathe in the sink, a sight known to induce something close to a heart attack in new recruits. “Hello,” she liked to say, perching her paws on the edge, whiskers alert. The rest of them had just gotten used to it.

If people were prone to gossiping about each other’s dæmons, and spies were prone to gossip, period, and suspicion generally speaking, it followed logically that no man in the Circus escaped immense scrutiny where his dæmon was concerned: everybody’s seemed to reflect some suspicious trait or moral failing, even those deemed broadly unobjectionable. Percy Allaline, for instance, was possessed of an utterly unappealing little pug, who sat on the floor next to him and breathed noisily, its small body shaking visibly as it did so, this in spite of his reasonably good health. It was also male, a subject nobody brought up to his face and everybody did behind his back. There seemed to be no precise explanation for this, except that Percy was unpleasant and it seemed appropriate that he had been assigned a vaguely unnatural appendage by whatever gods or powers decided such things.

“His mother probably dropped him on his head when he was a baby,” Control had liked to comment, and then, when someone inevitably pointed out that this would have had no effect whatsoever on the sex of Allaline’s dæmon, customarily made a very vulgar comment about Mrs. Allaline’s sexual mores (god rest her soul). Control had in his life been possessed of a very large raven, who had perched in a dark corner of his office and shrieked at people, sometimes pointedly and sometimes seemingly for no reason at all.

“Does it talk, or what,” Bill Haydon was known to mutter, for in fact Control’s dæmon did not speak in front of anybody but Control—not itself terribly unusual, except for her other interjections.

Bill himself had the star of the pack, and always had done: of course this was unremarkable, given that Bill was the star of everything he did wherever he went. Aurora, unlike the other dæmons in the Circus, did not tend to wander far away from him, choosing instead to lay draped across his shoulders—playing the part, one supposed, of a living, breathing collar on a fox fur coat—or twined around his arm, or curled in his lap. In the spring and summer she was a bright red color and in the winter she turned a pure white.

“Like the aurora,” he liked to joke, stroking two fingers down her smooth back.

“I thought arctic foxes turned brown in the summer,” Smiley had said to him once, years before, and he had just shrugged, smiling his sneakily dazzling smile.

“I guess she’s one of a kind,” he’d said, sliding her effortlessly over his shoulders again, where she settled down like some kind of royal ruff. Smiley always supposed this suited Bill, who was himself as blue-blooded as they came, and not shy about it.

“I thought they were supposed to stop changing,” is how Jim Prideaux had remarked upon this phenomenon decades earlier, watching it happen for the first time in the small old rooms at New College, Aurora curled in a tight ball in Bill’s lap, mottled fur poking outward. “By now.”

“Oh, she’s settled,” Bill had said lightly, with the supreme confidence and self-assurance of a boy just gone nineteen. “Some foxes do this, you see. Change color in the winter, to the spring. She’ll be orange soon enough.” He ran her hand over her smooth fur, which stood up behind his fingers, staticky, and Jim Prideaux, curled up in an armchair next to him, curled up his fists in his lap. Thisby, lying out in front of the fire, legs stuck out straight, let out a sigh.

 

**3.**

Karla, they said, had no dæmon at all. Or he had one, but it had never been seen. It was never in the same room as him. Or it was so small that it could be with him at all times and nobody knew. Everybody had heard stories, of course, of men with dæmons who were beetles, things like that, who kept them in little tins—but nobody had ever actually encountered anybody who had to take such a precaution. Nobody knew anyone who had, for god’s sake, a _bug_.

Karla was a witch, some suggested. Witches, others replied sternly, had died out centuries ago. If there were any witches left, Karla was one of them, went the standard response. It did not seem entirely unlikely, witch or no, that he and his dæmon had trained themselves to establish serious distance. After all, Roy Bland’s Dorothea could toddle down to the conveniences by herself; it would hardly be difficult for Karla to keep his in the next room.

But: Smiley had interrogated him once, Guillam thought, poring over this. He had discussed this in detail. He had been held in a jail—flown back to Moscow from India—and they had not found anything. Any trace of a dæmon anywhere. Guillam had asked.

“Nothing,” Smiley had replied, eyes slightly glassy, lifting his glass to his lips. “Nothing at all.”

“Did he seem—” Guillam started, and then stopped.

“Detached?” Smiley continued, never one to shy away from a subject of conversation, unless that subject was his marriage. “No, no. That is—certainly he was an irregular sort of person, yes. But— _you_ know—no, I don’t believe so. He was too… present. I don’t believe that was so at all.”

“Then where was it?” Guillam asked, and Smiley, drunk, shrugged.

“Perhaps it was inside of him,” he said, raising his glass again. “Perhaps he did not need one at all.”

Guillam said nothing, just watched him. “Oh, who knows,” Smiley said, waving a hand. “The witches could send theirs hundreds and hundreds of miles. I suppose his must be able to fly.”

Guillam’s Pepper had her head on his leg and was whimpering softly at the thought of this. He scratched her head, fingers clumsy, and watched Smiley’s hedgehog, who had her head tucked under herself on the floor, and seemed to be sound asleep, spikes all the way up all the way round. Probably she wasn’t, though. Probably she was listening. She wasn’t a proper English hedgehog, but one of those strange domesticated ones, he thought they came from Africa, small enough to fit in your hand. She could fit in Smiley’s coat pocket and this was typically how she traveled, which gave him the illusion, too, of wandering around with no dæmon at all. It occurred to Guillam that he didn’t know what her name was.

 

**4.**

Thisby had a limp when she walked, now, just how Jim’s back didn’t sit straight anymore at all. It didn’t stop her from getting around but it was noticeable. The boys noticed it, although they refrained from comment. He could tell they discussed it. They watched her with too much interest, though he supposed they would have watched any new teacher’s dæmon with too much interest, especially one that looked in any way exotic.

“What is she, sir?” somebody finally asked, a couple of months into the term. He turned to stare long and hard at the offending student, who swallowed and shrunk into his seat. Bill Roach, across the room, was glaring at the boy as though he had committed a capital offense.

“An Iberian wolf,” Jim said eventually. None of them seemed to have any idea what this was, which was unsurprising.

“There are still some in Spain,” he said. “I saw them when I was a boy, growing up. I must have liked them. Or she must have.” This was true: he remembered it still, vividly. They were leaner than the wolves you saw photos of sometimes, with their wide beautiful ruffs, and smaller, tougher-looking. He had seen some in a zoo, huddled together in the corner of a cage, gunk crusted in the corners of their eyes, shuddering against each other. She had curled against his chest. And years later one of them had remembered.

“Oh,” the boy said, relaxing slightly. Thisby moved to sit straight next to him, profile very noble, surveying them all, instead of lounging under the desk as was her usual custom. Almost all of them had settled, except for poor Roach—but, crucially, not all of them. Mostly they pretended, sticking to something for a whole day, or even days at a time, but it wasn’t real yet. It wasn’t the same, and they all knew it.

“She didn’t settle until I was sixteen,” Jim continued calmly, which also was not a lie. Fifteen pairs of eyes widened, and then blinked. “Isn’t that right?” he said, turning to look down at her, and she growled, showing all her teeth.

They all cowered a little, except for Roach, who looked relieved.

“Did she really not settle until you were sixteen, sir?” he asked that afternoon, out by Jim’s trailer, where he was sitting drinking, Thisby sprawled at his feet.

“Yes,” she said, and he stared. His own dæmon was a dog today, a big shaggy thing trying to huddle behind him, which was fruitless as it was larger than he was.

“Nothing too bad about waiting,” Jim said, reaching down to scratch her ears. “Things have a way of working themselves out.”

“Oh,” Bill said, and then lingered awkwardly for a few more moments, seemingly at a loss, before fleeing back toward the school.

“A very sad little boy,” Thisby said around a yawn when he was far enough gone.

“Yes,” Jim agreed, and that night slept all wrapped around her like she was a woman, face mashed against her back, except that Jim had never been very interested in women, as it happened.

**5.**

Smiley, as he worked, trying to root the mole out of the Circus, the mole who had put Jim Prideaux halfway across England at a boys school teaching French and living in a trailer with the shadows of bullets in his back, sat in a small dingy hotel reading files from sunset until sunrise, and held them up just so, in order that Regina, sitting with her front paws resting on an upturned ashtray, could read them too.

Most people, he knew, would have found this behavior utterly absurd. He was not, however, most people, even within the peculiar community that made up the Circus. Control had discovered this habit of his, once upon a time, and had found it unremarkable, but Control had been a strange, strange man in his own way, and had grown stranger and stranger as he got closer and closer to his death. Still, it was not enough, he had always thought, to explain to her what he had read, or learned; nor was it enough to rely upon the inarticulable bond through which information seemed to pass as needed. Regina read just as fast as he did, after all. It was hardly any trouble.

“George and Regina,” Ricki Tarr had commented recently, apparently full of glee. “How patriotic.”

“Yes,” Smiley had said. “My mother did love the queen.”

“May they both rest,” Ricki had replied. “Unless your mum’s still alive, in which case, god bless her.”

“No,” Smiley had said. “She’s dead.”

Ricki Tarr, for all of his annoyances, and indeed self-absorption, was an unsettlingly perceptive fellow, which was presumably how he had wound up in the service in the first place, and managed to survive for as long as he had without dying or winding up in an interrogation room, improbably enough. He had a surprisingly pretty weasel called Emily that got in everything before you noticed or could stop her, and who, Smiley was sure, was very popular with women. She was also chatty, which he could tell drove Peter Guillam in particular up the wall.

“Hello again,” she said when they arrived one afternoon, halfway up the drapes, Tarr sitting chewing on something or other and watching the football. She craned her head around, staring at them upside down. “It’s been _ages_.”

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

“Well, go on then, be friendly,” Tarr said, waving vaguely at them without looking away from the television.

“Hello,” Peter ground out. Ricki smirked, an expression so tiny you would have missed it if you hadn’t been watching for it especially, which of course George was.

“ _Thank_ you,” said Emily, sounding vaguely affronted, and dropping to the floor suddenly, bounding over to stand precariously on her hind legs right in front of Guillam’s dog, who lurched backwards. “You don’t look very happy to see me,” she said, wobbling forward. Ricki was smirking visibly now.

“Get this—get her away from me,” Peter huffed.

“Lay off, Emily,” Ricki said without feeling. Emily sighed, and began to wander away, still glancing at Pepper over her shoulder.

“The thing about Guillam,” Ricki said some time later, when Peter was outside having a smoke to get away from him, “is he’s really just a dead boring bloke, isn’t he? He’s got that dog—boring dog, awfully boring, innit? But he doesn’t _want_ to be boring, he wants to be interesting. So he works hard not to be boring, but that never works, of course, as you know.”

“You seem very interested in him for someone you think is so very dull.”

“Me, I’m interested in all types,” Ricki said. Across the room, something clattered to the floor: Emily was nosing around in a cupboard. “Especially as are connected to you, Mr. Smiley.”

“Hmm,” Smiley said, and started when Emily, yowling, fell all the way out of the cupboard and onto the floor.

That evening, Guillam drove him back to the hotel with his hands in tight fists on the steering wheel, Pepper sulking in the backseat. “I don’t see why we must continue associating with that—that—” he said, really working himself up.

“He’s just as fascinated with you, I assure you,” Smiley said calmly, “though as a general rule I don’t encourage fraternization,” and Guillam went white as a sheet and said nothing the entire rest of the drive.

The next time they saw Tarr, he and Pepper stood ceremoniously at the doorway and stared straight in front of themselves. Ricki looked at them, bemused, and then grilled Smiley on what was going on next. Smiley did not in fact have much to tell him, but left alone Ricki Tarr was liable to do foolish things. He was in the middle of saying something pedestrian when there was some clamor behind him. Guillam was making a noise, and Ricki was laughing oddly in front of him. He turned to look and saw Emily crawling all over Pepper’s back, nosing around curiously. Pepper seemed aggrieved but resigned, and had laid down on the floor, muzzle on her paws. Emily was chattering away, leaning down to look her in the eye. Peter was apoplectic. His hands fluttered impotently above them. There was, of course, nothing he could do.

“Tarr,” he barked. “Get—do—I _demand_ —”

But Ricki just laughed. “If you think I control her, mate,” he said, “you’ve got it backwards.” And by the time it was ready for them to go, some fifteen minutes later, Emily had emerged victorious: the two of them were sitting under the little table in the corner, Pepper’s lower voice murmuring under Emily’s faster, chattering one, and Peter had the face of a broken man.

“As you were, gentlemen,” Ricki said as they left, eyes glinting as he closed the door behind them, and Smiley thought he could detect in Pepper a hint of shame, somehow, as they made their way to the car.

“Very embarrassing,” Regina said later that night, in-between files.

“Quite entertaining, though,” George said, and she chuckled.

**6.**

When he eventually found Jim, out there with all of those boys, he was unsurprised to be received first by Thisby, hackles raised teeth bared, growling, in the darkness of the night. “It’s quite all right,” he said mildly. “I’m just here to have a chat.”

She only growled more. He saw that her fur was badly damaged and that she seemed off-balance somehow. In his pocket, he ran his fingers over Regina’s curled spines.

Later, Thisby sat in the car at Jim’s feet, and then walked, limping, alongside him, all the while saying nothing. Jim had not ever, to George’s recollection, been a talkative man: but there were things that he had to exorcise. Still, he did not think he had ever heard Thisby speak. Of course Regina barely spoke in front of other people, too.

“I was all right,” Jim said. “For a while. Even with everything they were doing to me. I mean—course I wasn’t all right, but I wasn’t giving them the things they really wanted. I thought—I’ll keep those things buried so deep even if I wanted to give them away I wouldn’t know where to find them.” He paused. “It’s all a joke, though. They should just start off with it. They just come in, pick her up”—he made a careless, angry gesture—“and carry her off down the hallway. And she can go far, you know.” Thisby had come to huddle against his legs. He rested his good hand on her head. “But it doesn’t matter. The second they’ve got their hands on her—and then no matter how far, they take her far enough. And you’ll tell them anything. Anybody will. You’d have to be a monster not to. I don’t know why we pretend we’ll be able to keep anything from them, if they get us. They know what to do. We could do it, too. I’m sure we do do it. It’s not very complicated, is it.”

“So you told them all of it.”

He scoffed. “Of course I did. I told them about Control, I told them about the mole in the Circus, I told them about Tinker Tailor. It told them every goddamn thing they wanted to know and I was crying while I did it. I just wanted her back. I was terrified even if I told them they wouldn’t do it. I knew she wasn’t—gone. But who knows what those people will do? Who knows what anybody will do. It’s a dirty fucking business we’re in, George. It’s full of bad fucking people.”

“Well,” Smiley said after a long moment. “You did get her back.”

Prideaux let out a huff of humorless laughter. “I guess so,” he said. “I guess I did. And here we are.”

They looked out at the lights flickering in the town below them. “Can you remember anything about who they had speaking to you?” he asked.

“After,” he said. “Well—at the end, I guess. And after, when it was calmer. One man. The head of all of them, I could tell. I remember him.”

“And why is that?”

“Well,” Jim said, reaching up to rub at his bad shoulder. “He had an old lighter of yours, for one thing. That, I couldn’t figure. And he didn’t have a dæmon.”

“Ah,” Smiley said.

“So I guess you know him,” Jim said.

“In a manner of speaking,” Smiley said. “That was Karla.”

Jim didn’t say anything for a long time. “I never knew whether or not he was real,” he said.

“Oh, he’s real,” Smiley said. “I’ve met him. And now you have, too.”

“Looks like one of us got the better deal,” Jim said sourly.

“That it does,” Smiley said very soberly, and from Jim’s feet, Thisby let out a low growl.

 

**7.**

Before heading out to Prague, the first in a number of steps that would lead to him to a set-up, two bullets in his back, and finally a small featureless room screaming as two very unpleasant-looking men dragged Thisby out of the door and down the hallway, Jim Prideaux made his way to a little house in Kentish Town, which was where Bill Haydon was living at the moment, with some woman or another he’d knocked up at some point. It was unlikely to last. It never did, with Bill. The fact that he was getting older did not matter. Eventually, Jim supposed, he would get old enough that he would simply run aground, although this was far from certain. Jim was not himself aware of how much he had invested in this particular theory—of how much he conducted his life based around the belief that it would one day come to pass—and this was likely for the best.

“Well, look who it is,” Bill said when he opened the door, smiling his familiar smile, Aurora draped around his shoulders. Bill was not the sort of person who under normal circumstances would have opened the door to visitors himself, but due to his choice of profession had presumably taken to looking out from the upstairs window whenever anybody rang the bell.

“Hello, Bill,” Jim said, leaning one hand down on Thisby’s back, as she smiled up at them, tongue hanging out of her mouth. “Could I have a word?”

“Well, isn’t that formal,” Bill said, raising his eyebrows. “I’ve never known you to be so serious, Jim-bo.”

“He’s very serious,” Thisby said, “don’t be silly,” and Bill grinned down at her.

“I suppose that’s right,” he said.

“I’ve got to tell you something,” Jim muttered more urgently, and this time when Bill looked at him his expression was different, sharper. He reached up a hand and ran it down Aurora’s back.

“Well, all right,” he said, in the same light tone of voice. “Let’s go down to the pub, then.”

“All right,” Jim said, sounding relieved.

They did not, of course, go to a pub. Bill was not really cut out for pubs—he was cut out for clubs, and they certainly could not go to his club, perhaps the spot most well-known in all of London for eavesdropping. Pubs, of course, were equally unreliable. So they ambled down the road to Jim’s car, got in, and drove aimlessly about, Bill glancing behind them, until they wound up on some dark street in Camden, slipping into a hotel.

“You always take me to such fine places,” Bill said as he fell back on the bed, tossing the bottle of Jack he had brought from home to the side. “Go on, get the glasses.”

Jim took two from the bureau and went into the bathroom to wash them before reemerging and handing one to Bill, who instead reached out and grabbed both of them, balancing them precariously on the bedcovers and filling them halfway. On the other side of the room, Thisby was curling up on the ground, Aurora nestled in her legs, as was customary.

“Here,” he said, passing it back, and then leaned back, eyeing Jim speculatively. “Well, what’s all this then?”

Jim rolled the glass in his hands before taking a sip and sitting down in the room’s one chair. “I’m going somewhere,” he said tersely. “Tomorrow. I—” He paused. Bill was very still but otherwise hadn’t moved.

“I need to tell you something,” he said again.

“All right,” Bill said.

“I—” Jim started again, and looked down at his glass.

“Tell him,” Thisby said, voice deep, and Bill glanced over at her. Aurora’s head was tucked under her chin. She looked like she was asleep already.

“Control’s sending me on a mission,” Jim said. “Nobody else knows about it. Well, no—obviously—but it’s very hush-hush. Nobody else knows _why_. As far as I know. I don’t entirely know why myself.” He paused.

“I think he’s lost it,” he said baldly. “Control. I think he’s lost it. He’s very ill, and—he thinks there’s a mole in the Circus,” he said finally, meeting Bill’s eyes, which widened slightly. “And this is supposedly some kind of—I don’t know. Something to do with that.”

“A mole?”

“Yes,” Jim said. “But, you see—he’s convinced it’s either—Alleline, Bland, Esterhase, or— _Smiley_ —or—”

“Me,” Bill said, when a long moment had passed and Jim had said nothing more.

“Yes,” Jim said.

“Christ,” Bill said.

“He’s gone mad,” Jim said dully. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing. But—”

“Don’t go,” Bill said, sounding outraged. “Don’t go on this—whatever it is you’re doing—if you think it’s—”

“I’m going,” Jim said. “I have to go.” He shrugged. “But—”

Bill looked at him for a long moment. Neither of them said anything.

“We wanted you to be safe,” Thisby said in the same low voice from across the room. Bill didn’t look away from him. He shrugged, and twiddled with his glass. Bill, meanwhile, put his decisively aside, and pushed himself forward on the bed.

“It’s been a long time, Jim-bo,” he said quietly, sitting on the edge. “Hasn’t it.”

Jim looked at the ceiling and didn’t say anything. He thought, distantly, that it was a shame he wasn’t a praying man. It would have been of great aid to him, he thought, to have been a praying man, many times over the years, including tonight. But he was not.

Bill had leaned forward—the room was very small—and put his hands around his hips. He was very skinny, Jim was, when you actually got your hands around him: all muscle and bone, even though they weren’t young anymore. He had always been like that, though he had not always been this skinny. There was something about him, now, that seemed starved.

“A long time,” Bill said, almost ruminatively, pulling him closer and closer, and when Jim finally looked down at him again, he shuddered so hard that he couldn’t remember the last time his body had been so out of his own control. And Bill was smiling as he pressed his face against his stomach.

 

**8.**

“We’re done,” Aurora said in the cell at Sarratt. She was huddled in his lap, shaking so hard it was as though her bones had come undone. “We’re done.”

“Don’t be silly,” Haydon said, holding onto her. “We’re going to Moscow. It’s all going to be fine.” Smiley had already come, and spoken to him: Smiley and his little hedgehog, who watched everything with her bright little beady eyes, and said nothing, and hardly moved.

“No, it isn’t,” she said, in the voice of someone who has seen something in the dark, who has had some kind of vision. “No, it isn’t.”

“They’re sending us to Moscow,” he said soothingly, running his hand along her white fur. “You’ll see. We’ll be all right.” They would already, he knew, be talking about her: how appropriate, the legend would go, that the great traitor had a dæmon who changed color. This made him irrationally angry, so he tried to stop thinking about it, and couldn’t.

“I don’t want to go to Moscow,” she said. “I want to stay here.”

“Well, we can’t do that,” he said, irritable. “We’re going to—”

“What about Jan,” she said. “And Ann. And cricket. And the good biscuits from the shop on the corner. And good tea. They won’t have good tea in Russia.”

“You don’t drink tea.”

“I know when you’ve had good tea,” she said, churlish.

“Don’t be stupid.”

“What about Jim,” she said, voice trembling. “And Thisby.”

He didn’t say anything.

“They’re fine,” he said.

“That’s not my point,” she said. Her little claws were pricking his skin through his trousers.

“God damn it, Aurora—”

“They must hate us,” she said, writhing a little on his lap, miserably. “They must hate us so much they never want to see us again—”

“Well, they’re not going to, so—”

She let out an anguished little cry and fell awkwardly to the floor, and scurried away from him to the corner of the room. He swore and hurried after her, puffing after a few moments as she dashed frantically from one end to the next, finally catching her by the tail as she shrieked.

“Shut— _up_ —”

“Why did we do it,” she was sobbing, “why did we do it—”

“You are being a _ridiculous child_ ,” he hissed, almost shaking her. “You were hardly complaining—”

“I want to see Jim,” she sobbed. “I want to see Jim.”

He swore again, and collapsed down onto the ground, legs splayed in front of him, letting her go too: she collapsed, a limp length of fur making agonized noises.

“You don’t want to see Jim,” he said. “Jim hates us.” But she only sobbed more.

They were still sitting there later that night, though Aurora was cried out, when something skittered against the door of his little cell—once, twice, three times. He blinked, and looked up. There was moonlight coming in through the window. The door led outside—to a little porch that looked out over the woods. It was really an appalling structure. If he were a younger man, he had told himself a number of times, reassuringly, he would certainly have made a break for it.

He stood up, holding Aurora in one hand, and pushed it open cautiously. At first he didn’t see anything, and then, blinking, made out a form in the leaves in front of him, not moving at all: a wolf. Aurora saw it too, and froze in his arms for a moment before wriggling and jumping down, and running so quickly over the grass that he almost didn’t see her leap up into Jim Prideaux’s arms.

 

**9.**

It was a joke at the Circus that Bill Haydon would be young and beautiful his whole life, and indeed this was somehow true, no matter how much older he got, until very suddenly it was not anymore. In fact they might have called him Dorian Gray, and not inaccurately. But the comparison would never have occurred to them, even though there were quite definitive rumors about what what Bill got up to in his spare time: it was as though a particular kind of sun shone through him and they all wished so very badly to be touched by its rays, grown men though they might have been.

But most of them had not known him when he went up to Oxford in the last years before the war—when, those who remembered all agreed, he truly had been youth and beauty personified. In those days Bill, in all his splendid magnanimity, endeavored always not to pick favorites but rather to bestow his majesty equally upon his adoring masses, thereby conveniently creating a constant stream of competition amongst everyone who knew him for just a little more attention, just a little more love. This suited him. But even Bill, about whom the foulest things imaginable would be said by everybody in the Circus many years later, could not entirely keep up this pretense of impartiality, and indeed, though he could not quite see it, everyone else loved him a little more for his obvious failure to do so. They knew before Bill knew, even, that he liked Jim Prideaux best, though as time passed he learned it, too, though Jim never quite believed it, and Bill for ages pretended otherwise. What he did not quite understand—this was, of course, his fatal flaw, both as an individual and as a spy—was that his obvious preference (or, indeed, love) for Prideaux only served to humanize him in the eyes of their peers. If he had picked another boy, perhaps they would have been jealous of him—but who could possibly be jealous of Jim? In other circumstances, perhaps, but not next to Bill. And that, of course, was why Bill had picked him.

Jim Prideaux came up to Oxford having spent the better part of his life being shuttled around from one country to the next in Europe, going from school to school of strange, brittle expatriate children whose fathers were diplomats or businessmen or lord knew what else. He had, as a result, many languages to his credit already, by the time he entered university—he had a facility for languages that somewhat belied his lifelong insistence that he was no good at intellectual pursuits—along with a rather exotic looking dæmon, an aptitude for athletics, and an almost paralyzing shyness.

He did not encounter Bill Haydon until Hilary term of that first year: Bill was at New College, and he was only at Keble, which he felt suited him better, but which had not pleased his father. He met him walking up Parks Road from the Bodleian—how many feet was that, how many meters? They could so easily not have met, that evening. They could so easily have passed each other by. Of course, perhaps they would have in some other way. Or perhaps not.

Bill was not especially given to study, but Jim had to work at it, or so he felt—he had to make an effort. Especially in those very early days, before they had met—when the only friends he had were awkward acquaintances from Keble who talked about their mutual public school friends and, if they chose to speak to him, asked him odd probing questions about various places in Europe, usually theatrically about the women living there, which was not a question Jim would have been even if he had been interested in women—he spent rather a lot of time studying, although he did not especially enjoy it. And this was how he found himself walking from the Bodleian as it was closing in the dark winter evening, huddled against the cold, and ran across a small group of boys and their dæmons clustered outside the King’s Arms, laughing hysterically as one of their number vomited on the street.

Jim stopped, unsure. Thisby was hesitating next to him so he put his hand on her head. They did not seem very concerned about the boy who was vomiting, but then he supposed they were probably all drunk. The boy’s dæmon, a hawk, was flying about haphazardly above them, looking about to crash at any moment. One of the boys was at least holding the sick one’s head while he threw up, although he was laughing, too. He had a fox curled around his shoulders. “Oy!” he shouted at Jim, who started, although he had been stopped, staring. “Have you got a handkerchief or something?”

Jim did, though he thought to himself that probably the rest of them did, too, and dug it out of his pocket, offering it to him wordlessly. He had been drunk before but he had never gotten drunk _with_ people. It seemed very foreign and strange to be standing amidst them watching their blotchy faces laughing so hard. It was not late yet. Vomiting on the street, Jim reflected, was awfully embarrassing.

“Cheers,” the boy who had taken his handkerchief said. “Afraid I can’t give it back to you at the mo’,” but the boy, at least, seemed to have stopped. The other boy straightened up, and turned to look at Jim, grinning. “Hallo, then,” he said. “Who’re you?”

“Jim,” Jim said, blinking. “Prideaux. Jim Prideaux. I’m at—” He gestured vaguely up the road at Keble.

“Ah,” the boy said, turning to look. “Yes. We’ve just been having a bit of a celebration”—guffaws—“that got rather out of hand. Isn’t that right, Alan?”

The unfortunate Alan let out a groan.

“Would you like to come eat some bread pudding with us?” the boy inquired suddenly. “We’ve loads, Chester’s mum sent it down. I’d offer liquor but I think we’d better sober up, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Jim said. “Probably.”

This was how he found himself in Bill Haydon’s rooms at New College—they were, as he had often suspected, walking past, nicer than his own—eating very good (if slightly stale) bread pudding with Thisby curled up next to him on a couch, watching everything with bright eyes.

The other boys had mostly vanished elsewhere, to pass out or throw up or possibly drink more. Bill, who still had not told him his name, seemed less drunk than he had initially appeared. His eyes were bright and quick and his speech was unimpaired.

“My father was at Christ Church,” he said, rolling his eyes. “And his father and his father before him—and my _mother_ ’s father—and her brother—and on and on—were all at Magdalen. So it was a great argument because I’m the only child.”

“Me, too,” Jim said, taking a bite of his pudding.

“Well, then you must understand completely,” the boy said. “I thought, to the hell with the lot of them, I’ll make my own way. So I closed my eyes and stuck my finger down on the list. Marred the Haydon family legacy, my father said. Of course.”

“My mother went to Newnham,” Jim offered. “My father was at Jesus, over there.”

“My god,” Haydon said. “However did you end up at Oxford, then.”

Jim shrugged. “I don’t quite know,” he said. “I suppose my father thought it was better. He has some odd ideas.”

“Well, of course it _is_ ,” Haydon said with perfect confidence. “Still, how peculiar.”

“He wasn’t very pleased about Keble,” Jim said after another moment had passed. Bill huffed and waved a hand.

“Fathers are never pleased,” he said. “About anything. It goes against their very nature. I’m never going to have children, I’ve decided, because I don’t want to be displeased all the time. It sounds dreadful.”

Jim smiled. Haydon’s dæmon stretched out in his lap, evidently self-satisfied.

“Anyway,” Haydon continued, “what is it that you’re good at? I _will not_ ask you what you’re reading because that is an awful question which I wish never to hear again, and besides it’s quite irrelevant.” His eyes had gotten very sharp. “But what is it that you’re _good_ at. You know, your—your— _animating force_.”

“I don’t know,” Jim said. Thisby rumbled supportively. “I quite like sport, I suppose. And languages. I know quite a lot of languages—well, at least the basics,” though in fact he was selling himself short.

“How’s that?”

“I grew up in Europe,” Jim said, and Haydon’s eyes grew sharp again.

“Well,” he said. “That’s interesting. More interesting than me, anyway. All that public school nonsense. The things boys do to one another in those places, you couldn’t imagine.”

“I could, maybe,” Jim said a little drily, and Haydon grinned. He was the most beautiful young man in the world. He was going to be, everyone agreed, young and beautiful forever. It transpired that he had sold his soul for it.  
  


*  
  


This was the story, then, of how Bill Haydon and Jim Prideaux met—“You haven’t told me your name,” Jim had to ask as he went to leave that night, many hours later, and Bill gaped theatrically and told him, and told him Aurora’s name, although the story of her coloring would not come until later. “This is Thisby,” Jim told him, and Bill laughed. “Well, that’s a bit portentous, isn’t it,” he said. “Are you planning on acquiring a doomed lover any time soon?” “My mother was eccentric,” Jim said, and didn’t notice that Bill, sharp as ever, noticed he had said _was_.

For a time Jim became one of many in Bill’s entourage—Bill was always creating excitement, causing things to occur, making something where there was nothing, and so his having an entourage seemed perfectly natural. He was frightfully exciting to be around. And yet he himself was a rather languid person much of the time. He created a stir about himself seemingly without effort, though this was of course an illusion. Bill put an enormous amount of effort into everything, whether or not he quite knew it.

Jim, as a happy consequence of falling in with the right people at the right time (or indeed, it would transpire, the very wrong people at the very wrong time), found himself in possession of friends, and wound up going out for various teams, and joining all sorts of societies, and generally forcing himself to be more sociable than came naturally to him. And he worked, unlike Bill, for he wanted to do well. This was engrained in him and would never go away: he wanted to do well. Bill found it very endearing. “No, no, I’m not criticizing you,” he said in a somewhat patronizing tone of voice when Bill bristled. “It’s very admirable. I do not have your stamina.” But privately, deep inside of him, he _was_ impressed: because he did not. He had a very different kind of doggedness to him, did Bill Haydon, but he did not have the kind of doggedness that Jim Prideaux did: doggedness with no clear sense of payoff or gratification.

As time passed, however, Bill’s preference for Prideaux became clearer and clearer to everybody but the two of them. It would have been embarrassingly obvious if it were not simply endearing. Bill was a famous womanizer by this point—he was, after all, the golden boy of their year—and had also been known to take up with other boys, too, a fact which Jim resolutely refused to acknowledge. But he was not emotional. This was part of what drew people to him. He gave nothing away. Still, slowly had something begun to seep out: a kind of sappy infatuation, almost, with earnest athletic Jim Prideaux, whom the few people who actually knew him well said knowingly was sharp as a tack and not to be underestimated, but who was also rather obvious in his affections. In anybody else this would likely have been the subject of mockery—but again: how could you mock Prideaux? They all loved Haydon, in their own individual ways. And how could you be jealous of him? There was something about him that seemed as elemental as the earth. He seemed, in some strange way, to deserve it.

It was the beautiful spring of their second year, the war a haze on the horizon, and there was a low-level mania in Haydon, who had not yet acknowledged what the rest of them knew, which was that he was in love with Prideaux, whatever that might mean, exactly. Prideaux, they all knew, was in love with Haydon, and they were quite certain they did know what that meant. Prideaux, it was well known, didn’t like girls: he didn’t know how to talk to them, and didn’t seem interested in learning. And he spent most of the time Haydon wasn’t looking at him looking at Haydon. They had all encountered things like this before, at their schools: was Europe, they wondered, different? They would have thought there were more fairies in Europe, but they would not really have known, having spent their time there with their parents as small boys. Did Jim think he had already grown out of it? That time, they knew, came for everyone, but it certainly seemed not to have arrived just yet. It was all slightly strange, they acknowledged, but they were all in love with Bill, after all, and so it seemed quite natural, in a backwards sort of way.

By the time term came to an end, Haydon seemed close to losing it, and Aurora had taken to spending most of her time curled up around Thisby’s neck, when possible. Prideaux was anxious because Haydon was anxious, and their anxiety was making everybody else nervy. It was a bad situation all-round. When not moving, Thisby cleaned Aurora aggressively, like a cat, and Haydon, across the room, would twitch.

On the last night of term, when everybody else was out getting smashed, and throwing up in the street and contemplating the feasibility of the May Day jump—already passed for that year, nevertheless a subject for discussion always—Bill showed up at Jim’s door and dragged him out to the University Parks, where they sat in the evening light late into the night, Thisby and Aurora at their feet, listening to the distant sounds of youthful stupidity, which had of course spilled over into the parks, but not quite into their little corner.

“It’s going to be a rotten summer,” Bill said gloomily. “Just rotten. What on earth am I going to do with my parents, cooped up in that dreadful house.”

“I’ll be with my father,” Jim said. “Alone.”

Bill shuddered. “Alone in _Yorkshire_ ,” he said. “Christ knows what anybody has to do in Yorkshire. Moan about young men on the heath I suppose. You must read all of your Brontë.”

“My father’s taken a house for the summer,” Jim said gloomily. “I’ve no choice.”

“I’ll come visit,” Bill said munificently, lying down in the grass. “Grace the both of you with my presence.”

“My father would be very impressed by you,” Jim said. “And hate you, probably.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“My mum would probably have liked you more,” Jim said slightly ruefully. “But she’s dead.”

Bill blinked open an eye to look at him. “You never talk about your mother.”

“No,” Jim said. “I try not to.”

Bill hummed. “My mum’s dreadful,” he said. “They’re both dreadful, to be perfectly frank with you. It’s a pity I never had siblings to commiserate with.”

Jim laughed a little. “I guess that’s what Aurora is for.”

“Too right,” she mumbled, half-asleep.

They sat in silence for a moment, watching the light fall and sky grow darker. It was perfectly clear out: an auspicious sign. The stars were beginning to prick through the velvet blackness of the heavens. Jim knew most of the ones he could see. He’d been teaching himself.

Bill let out a long breath. “Do you ever feel,” he said, eyes closed, “like you’re just—not the person you think you are? I mean—you think you’re somebody—but you actually aren’t that person at all?”

“No,” Jim said truthfully. Bill sighed again.

“I don’t think I’m the person other people think I am,” Jim said, although the view other people had of him was much closer to his own view of himself than he might have imagined. “But I guess that’s different.”

Bill blinked his eyes open, gazing at the sky. “I suppose so,” he said, and then suddenly was sitting up again. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go, let’s go.” Jim, startled, followed him when he got up, and when he started walking away purposefully, gesturing at them all to follow. Aurora looked jolted.

It was dark by the time they got back to New College, and practically deserted: everyone had taken their carousing elsewhere. “Come on,” Bill said, whispering anyway, dragging him by the wrist into the garden quad and over to the mound.

“What the hell,” Jim said, as he pulled him up into the trees, Thisby scrambling behind with Aurora hanging on for dear life. They climbed until they reached the top, and Bill toppled them over, into the thicket of greenery, peering back up at what they could see of the sky through the trees overhead. It looked like they were in a very small wood.

“What’s gotten a hold of you,” Jim asked, very aware of the fact that they were not, in fact, very far at all from the college buildings, where there must have been some people who had not rushed out from exams and end of term madness, though he supposed that there was very little chance that they would be seized by the sudden desire to climb the mound in the middle of the night and go messing around in the trees on top. That seemed like a singularly Bill Haydon sort of thing to do.

“I like it in here,” Bill said. “It feels like you’re someplace else entirely. Doesn’t it? Nobody ever bothers you.”

“I guess we know your secret hiding place now,” Jim joked half-heartedly, but Bill was looking at him strangely.

“Yes,” he said. “You do.”

Jim was bigger than Bill: this thought occurred to him suddenly. It seemed impossible it had not before, but everything between them was so peculiar. Bill was slightly taller but Jim was bigger—stronger. Bill was fit enough, but not like Jim. This seemed very inconsequential, however. He felt very small.

Bill was breathing oddly. They were pushed in quite close together between the trees. Jim was trying to decide whether or not to say something when Bill said suddenly, “Have you ever—done it with anybody?” He’d stumbled in the middle of the sentence, and then his language had gotten vague. It didn’t seem like that was exactly what he’d wanted to ask.

Jim swallowed. “I—no,” he said. He’d kissed a girl very awkwardly, at his school in Switzerland, when he was sixteen. She had been quite aggressive. He had known from a much younger age that he did not like women but that had confirmed it. How odd, he would later think, in thinking all of this over, that something so utterly benign should have felt so certain—one kiss from a girl in Switzerland.

“Oh,” said Bill, sounding very strange. “I didn’t—I wasn’t sure.” Jim swallowed. “You should,” he continued, still sounding odd. “So that when you—get married—you know what you’re doing.”

A series of things went through Jim’s mind very quickly: a series of options. Of potential courses of events. Insofar as he could in the space of a few moments, he evaluated his options. In spite of his protestations, he was a very clever young man. He took a gamble.

“I’m not going to get married,” he said, and licked his lips. There was a pause.

“Why not?” Bill said.

“I don’t like women,” Jim said. His hands were sweating. In fact all of him was sweating. It was very warm out. Sticky. He hadn’t noticed before.

Bill didn’t say anything for a long time. “People think that sometimes,” he said finally. His breathing was audible. “People—”

“I know I don’t,” Jim said, interrupting.

“But you haven’t—you know,” Bill said, pushing.

“You know you do,” Jim said. “I guess you did before you— _you know_.”

The silence stretched out before them. “Jim,” Bill said in a low voice. “Could you—” And his hand was slipping into the top of Jim’s thin white shirt, that the heat had made limp.

He undid one of the buttons. “Jim,” he said in his ear. His voice sounded low. He seemed to be waiting for something—some sign. Jim let out a long, shuddering breath.

He could just barely see him in the dark. The liquid glisten of his eyes: the soft shine of his hair. He was breathing heavily and looking up at him with one hand on his chest.

“Bill,” Jim croaked, and made a weird choking noise when Bill moved that hand south, and with his other levered himself up to kiss him.

  
*  
  


That night, after they’d stumbled home and haphazardly washed off, Jim lay in bed with Thisby’s head on his chest, staring at the ceiling.

“It’s impossible, you know,” she murmured, eyes half-closed.

“What?” he said, fuzzy.

“Bill,” she said—she, always Bill’s partisan. “He’s… impossible.”

He opened his mouth, ready to defend him, an automatic mechanism. But he stopped.

“He needs love from everybody,” she said. “He’s an… impossible person.”

He swallowed. “I know,” he said, because in some way he did. Bill was insatiable. But what he wanted—what he wanted most of all in the world, and what he did in some small way believe might be true, was for Bill to love him better than he loved everybody else. And that would be enough, he thought.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“It does,” she said, “but I know what you mean.”

It wouldn’t be enough, of course. It never is. But what else was there?

**10.**

In the room in the house in Lock Gardens the evening that Smiley flushed everybody out, everything was quite chaotic, although Guillam couldn’t keep track of it properly. Haydon sat in the corner, Aurora draped sullenly over his lap, looking at nothing, while Esterhase’s pretty, odd-looking little bird—Guillam had never worked out what it was exactly—flew frantically around their heads, cheeping. Polyakov had a lizard of some sort wrapped around his wrist and was making all kinds of noise. Guillam wanted to throw him out the window just to shut him up. Alleline’s pug—Balthazar?—was flopped on the ground panting as per usual. Smiley had his dæmon in his hands and was running his fingers over her spikes. Guillam reached down to pat Pepper reassuringly, and she whuffled, resigned.

After they had taken Bill away and the rest of them had dispersed, Guillam stood outside the house, temporarily unmoored. Smiley was the last out of the house, closing the door definitively behind him. His dæmon was back in his coat pocket—Guillam could see the bulge, since he knew to look for it. He walked down the steps and over to him, looking up at him calmly. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said, and off they went.

It was very dark out, and the sounds of London around them were faint and distant-seeming as they made their way along the canal. Guillam didn’t quite know what to say, or if he wanted to say anything. His brain was a jumble.

“Well,” Smiley said. “They’ll be bringing Ricki Tarr back from Paris.”

Peter choked on nothing. “I—”

“Everyone will be very pleased,” George said sagely. “And they’ll be sacking everyone else, of course.”

“You don’t mean—”

“I mean nothing,” George said smoothly, and then sighed.

“A terrible business,” he said finally.

“I don’t know how he could do it,” Peter finally burst out. “I don’t—”

“Nobody knows why anybody does anything,” George said, sounding weary all of the sudden. “Nobody knows anybody.”

“But—” Peter started, and then stopped. “If nothing else,” he said finally. “This means he—he sent Jim out there—”

“Yes,” George said distantly. “Very possibly to his death.”

“That’s,” Peter said. But he had no words to describe what it was. There was nothing he could imagine as cruel as what Bill had done to Prideaux.

“It is like,” George said very clearly, “having a dog for many years, a dog that is utterly devoted to you, and sending it off to protect you, into a cave full of bears ready to tear it apart, because for some reason it is useful for you for the dog to die.”

Peter shuddered.

“But you love the dog,” George said ruminatively, as Pepper pressed herself so hard against his legs he almost tripped. “In some way, you do love the dog. But you don’t hesitate to send it away.”

Cars rushed by above them. The lights glittered on the water of the canal.

“Maybe it would have been better if he had died over there,” Peter said.

“Maybe,” George said. “Maybe not.”

 

**11.**

“Jim?” Bill asked of the woods, squinting into the darkness. Jim emerged, stroking Aurora down the back. She was sobbing again, pressing herself against him, practically out of her mind, and he was shushing her. Bill had never seen her in that state before, but when she was frantic only Jim could calm her down like that. People besides Jim weren’t allowed to touch Aurora.

Thisby limped up and looked at him warily. She looked bad. Jim looked bad. His back was awful. But Bill was looking at Thisby, who was looking at him in a way he didn’t recognize at all. He held out his hand to her, as though she were actually a dog, and finally she jumped up onto the porch, and stood just as stock still as before.

“Hello,” he said, and reached out slowly to touch her head. As soon as he had she gave it up and shuddered. Jim stopped moving, too, he saw out of the corner of his eye. She sank down, whimpering, and he crouched next to her, running his hands over her poor maligned body until she was pressed up against him, still whimpering, as his fingers smoothed over her rough bare patches, ran through her fur.

“Come on, Jim,” he said. “Come on up.”

Jim, when he stepped onto the porch, was as white as a sheet. Aurora was breathing heavily, pressed against his chest. He looked at Bill for a moment without saying anything and then sat down heavily in one of the two chairs. Bill sat down in the other, Thisby huddled against him, and looked at him.

“I am awfully sorry, you know,” he said. “It all turned into quite a mess.”

Jim looked at him without saying anything and pulled a bottle of Jack out of his jacket. Bill made an obscene noise and took it, unscrewing the top and taking a drink straight from the bottle.

“You’ve no idea how much I needed that,” he said. “Nothing in bloody days and they’ve got me locked up in this awful place with nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs and ruminate on my sins. Enough to drive a man batty.”

Jim was looking at him again with an unsettling expression.

“I _am_ sorry,” he said. “Really. It wasn’t personal.” Jim’s eyebrows inched upwards.

“Well, it wasn’t!” he said. “I wish I could make you understand.”

“That seems unlikely,” Jim said finally, voice hoarse. Bill deflated a little, just from hearing it.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter anyway,” he said, taking another swig from the bottle. “I’ll be gone soon, won’t I? Never to be seen again.”

Something passed over Jim’s face. Neither of them spoke for a moment.

“How long?” Jim said finally. Bill winced.

“How long?” Jim asked again. Bill shrugged.

“A long time,” he said.

“Were you—” Jim paused, lips twisting. “ _Cultivating_ me at school?”

Bill stared. “No,” he said. “I mean, I—I suggested you to the Circus, but I—no.”

Jim did not look convinced. “Jim,” Bill said, sounding increasingly alarmed, “I didn’t—I wouldn’t—”

Jim turned to look at him. “How do I know what you would or wouldn’t do?” he asked.

“You know me better than anybody in the world,” Bill said, without missing a beat, and Jim’s eyes widened slightly.

“If that’s true,” Jim said slowly, “you’ve lived a sad fucking life, Bill.”

Bill could feel his face going red. “Look—”

“We all worshipped you,” Jim said. “All of us. At uni, in the war, in the Circus. Everybody worshipped you. And you must have been laughing about us behind our backs to some other Control at some other Circus the whole time.”

Bill stared. “That isn’t—”

“I’d laugh at Alleline and Esterhase, too,” Jim said. “Bland, even. But the rest of us—”

“That’s not what it’s like,” Bill said.

“Tell me what it’s like, then,” Jim said, and Bill opened his mouth, but for the first time in as long as he could remember had no words at all.

Jim let out a bitter huff of laughter, looking away. He scritched his fingers over Aurora’s fur, though. “I defended you,” he said. “To Karla. I went into a rage about it. He must have laughed and laughed. Defended you about _Ann_.”

“Jim—”

But Jim was running his hand along Aurora’s back one last time before depositing her in Bill’s lap again. Bill grabbed his wrist desperately—he felt this was the last time he’d get the chance. “Jim,” he said, “Jim, I—”

“What?” Jim said. Bill opened his mouth, and then closed it.

“Nobody’s touched her but you,” he said very quickly. It wasn’t strictly the truth, but near enough. There had been accidental brushes, which everybody had tried to forget immediately. One unfortunate girl had put her hand on her and Aurora had shrieked and Bill had thrown her out of his flat. And then of course there had been the war. But—

Jim was just looking at him.

“Not Jan, not Ann,” Bill said hurriedly. “Not any of them. Jim—”

But Jim had closed his eyes and tilted his head back for a moment. Aurora had climbed down and was curling around Thisby as she always had. Years upon years upon years. Bill felt something in his throat that might have been tears. He could remember the last time that happened quite clearly because it had all been wrapped up in the Czech job, and Jim. It was all a mess. Everything was a mess.

“Oh, Bill,” he said. “You sad bastard.”

“What—” Bill said, and that was the last thing he said, before Jim shot him, and Aurora winked out of existence, and Thisby sank down onto the wood of the deck, looking exactly as old and destroyed as she was, trembling.

“Come on,” Jim said a moment later, standing up, looking down at her. “Time to go.” And so they went.

**Author's Note:**

> I am at tumblr [here](http://morgan-leigh.tumblr.com)!


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